Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The Grenfell Tower inferno shames London

It takes a lot to make me feel ashamed of London, my beloved home city. But yesterday’s tower-block inferno did it. The raging fire at Grenfell Tower in North Kensington, the disturbing speed with which this home to hundreds was reduced to a smouldering shell of a building, heaps shame on this city. It is positively Dickensian, a hellish scene out of place in 2017, like a violent echo from an older era when safety, especially the safety of the poor, was of little moment. London needs to look in the mirror. This cannot just be chalked up to ‘tragedy’.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that it was the low social status of the inhabitants of the tower that left them vulnerable to this horror. That’s a serious charge, I know, but how else do we explain that residents who complained about fire hazards were ignored? The Grenfell Action Group residents’ association complained to the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO) — which manages Grenfell — about ‘terrifying power surges’ caused by ‘faulty wiring’. It predicted that only a ‘serious fire in a tower block’ would lead to KCTMO being ‘brought to justice’. It remains to be seen how neglectful KCTMO was, if it was at all, but it is profoundly concerning that residents say their complaints were ignored. Their worries ‘fell on deaf ears’, they say. It’s hard to imagine the residents of one of Kensington’s plusher, more pleasing-to-the-eye builds being treated like this. There are many specific questions that must be asked — and answered — about this horrific fire. Most pressingly: how did a fire in one flat spread with such ferocious speed to the entire block? A flat-based fire can be a simple accident (though we don’t yet know if this fire was accidental or deliberate).

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